Book Review

Doubt Faithfully

~ Brian ~ 4 Comments
Reflecting on Between the Daylight and the Dark: Embracing the Contradictions of Life by Joan Chittister

Paradox and contradiction permeate life. That which we need for growth in the spiritual life is nearly always uncomfortable or disconcerting. When life knocks us off-balance, we ultimately find a surer footing and a deeper harmony as a result. Most of us want to avoid these situations, but we strive against that impulse, push outside our comfort zones, and aim for expanding our horizons despite the temporary growth pains. In a series of short chapters, Joan Chittister illuminates this paradox among many others we encounter on life’s spiritual journey. A perfect companion for Lent, this volume is magnetic in its simplicity. Sketching the contours of each contradiction, Joan’s reflections remove some of the fear we feel in these situations and grant us a share of her courage.

Between the Dark and the Daylight: Embracing the Contradictions of Life by Joan Chittister
Between the Dark and the Daylight: Embracing the Contradictions of Life by Joan Chittister

Doubt isn’t something that usually shows up in any list of important virtues. Neither is uncertainty. Chittister challenges us to see these “negative” perspectives as something more than things to be overcome. Rather, they are to be embraced. Before knowledge, she would argue, comes confusion. The mind becomes clouded before the clouds can lift to reveal the light of understanding. There is no arrival at one’s destination without the first unsure steps. Those steps aren’t something to hurry through or get over with as quickly as possible, but they’re to be actively experienced for what they are if we want to drink fully the marrow of life.

Darkness haunts all of us in terribly personal and individual ways. None of us have the same sins, vices, or transgressions against others. We run from our shadows. They frighten us all the more for having our shape. Evil, it seems, is as particular as goodness. Acknowledging and relating to the shadow side of the self affords us opportunities for change. Joan’s descriptions of this change, though, bring out the quality of conversion of heart. We often think of life-changing experiences as moments of clarity, religious visions, or dramatic experiences that alter our lives in a single instant. While these types of changes do happen, most change is gradual. It takes place incrementally over the course of days, months, and years. Rooted in the heart, these changes are no less important for their gradual evolution over time. In many cases, we make more diligent spiritual progress by faithful repetition and loving discipline than by trying to artificially generate ecstatic leaps forward. Enlightenment happens on God’s terms not on ours.

Anyone who meditates or practices a form of contemplative prayer understands this firsthand. It isn’t always doing but sometimes not-doing that moves us further along the way. Indeed, the whole concept of a set path or a defined distance we must travel to God collapses when it becomes clear that life isn’t linear at all. We connect to people, ideas, and the natural world in a web of strands – each having its own purpose, leading where it must go, and holding for a moment the will of the Divine for us. Some of these connections will outlast us and others may not, but they’ll have served their purpose and thereby served us well in any case.

Some questions never resolve themselves, not in this life anyway. The discovery Joan helps us make, and it is one I feel I must continually rediscover year after year, is that this is how it should be. We haven’t failed in life if questions persist. Anxiety, like the poor, will always be with us. There’s nothing wrong with not knowing the answers to life’s deepest questions beyond the shadow of doubt. The only problem is when we cease to ask them altogether.

Love Dangerously

~ Brian ~ 3 Comments
Reflecting on Eager to Love: The Alternative Way of Francis of Assisi by Richard Rohr

In an age with dating services like Ashley Madison, people seem to crave love, sex, and intimacy without risk. And yet, to love someone without the willingness to risk anything is a shriveled and shrunken kind of love. To love without risk to the self is not only cowardly, but not really even love at all. If love involves placing another before oneself, this kind of self-centered love that characterizes our age is more akin to mutual vanity – like two people sitting across from one another, each looking

Eager to Love by Richard Rohr
Eager to Love: The Alternative Way of Francis of Assisi by Richard Rohr

in a mirror. The illusion of mutuality is there, but love is surely not.

Nothing could be further from the love that shone forth from St. Francis. His was a love that took vulnerability to a level of Christ-like magnanimity. So overflowing and energetic was his love that I think it would be difficult for us moderns to recognize it. If exhibited today by a stranger or even a friend, we might mistake it for something contrived. Certainly, we would think, such love as this is much too raw to be real. It’s too faithful to be believed. It can’t possibly be authentic. Such is our depravity that we would mistake the naked face of love for a mask.

Richard Rohr does a tremendous job bringing the texture of Franciscan love alive for the contemporary reader. Rather than use Francis as a prop for some social or political thesis, Rohr places Francis before the reader and then surrounds him with the people, concepts, images, and experiences that all bear the mark of this saint’s particular manner of living. St. Bonaventure, John Duns Scotus, Pope Francis, and St. Clare contribute to Christianity in no small way and in no way without their relationship to Francis. Each influenced and was influenced by the Franciscan spirit. Francis’s way of relating to God through contemplation and simplicity constitutes less of a “path” or spiritual school of thought, and more of a disposition of heart.

The Franciscan way of downward mobility runs counter to notions of success in society as much in this age as in the age in which Francis lived, but Francis and his spiritual partner, Clare, resided outside systems and inside an ethic of service. The gift of their poverty was generosity. The more they renounced, the more they had to bestow. St. Francis and St. Clare together transcribe the teachings of Jesus, not with ink but with action. It always seemed odd to me that St. Clare would serve as the patron of television, a medium for which I always thought she’d have little use if she were alive today. Now I think that it’s the fact she’d have no need of it that makes her its perfect patron. Like love, it’s best when a screen isn’t something we turn on so as not to feel alone. Like love, media serves us better when it’s something we don’t consume lest it consume us in the process. Like love, it serves a higher aim than self-stimulation or it only serves to diminish oneself.

Love is never holy as an abstraction alone, teaches Francis. When he addresses the cosmic Christ, he does so as Brother Sun and Sister Moon; Brother Wind and Sister Water; Brother Fire and Sister Bodily Death. In doing so, he brings home the specificity of the holy. Nature doesn’t water down divinity to the Franciscan because it isn’t general, but richly painted in vivid detail and bursting with a radiant individuality. Holiness is naturally no less specific for being shared, just as God’s love is no less passionate for it’s being poured out equally upon all people. As Rohr says, “Religion’s primary and irreplaceable job is to bring this foundational truth of our shared identity in God to full and grateful consciousness.” It’s impossible not to hear this statement as a challenge to all contemporary religious leaders who, in an effort to exercise influence, sacrifice love on the altar of orthodoxy.

Modern Western men and women are eager to love in many ways, but lack of a true conception of what loving means leads them astray. Francis reminds us that even a true concept of love isn’t enough, as the truth of love bears itself out in the living of it. Love is embodied or it ceases to be. Love demands Incarnation. Is it no wonder, then, that the Christian tradition owes so much to the Little Poor Man of Assisi?